Confucius, he say about Britain

The other day I was reading Vanessa Hansen's beautifully lucid monograph on Chinese history and stumbled upon a very profound quote.

"Lead them by political maneuvers, restrain them with punishments: the people will become cunning and shameless. Lead them by virtue, restrain them with ritual: they will develop a sense of shame and a sense of participation."

Although the latter statement does not touch on the horrors and vices of Victorian Britain, it does succinctly describe the better sides of its spirit. On the other hand, Blair's Broken Britain, enveloped in the tight blanket of industrially produced PR lies and world's most numerous CCTV cameras, uncannily fits the former description.

Amazing, innit: something said in the 7th century BC still holds true.

On racism and reptiles

A lot of qualities that we call human are acquired through upbringing. Empathy, logic, attention span, manners, they all are introduced and nurtured in children. On the other hand, proper upbringing conditions, subdues or entirely wipes out many inborn qualities. But for social control, we would not consider incest, cannibalism or unwarranted aggression undesirable and repulsive.

It is the so-called R-complex, or the most ancient part of our brain, that we have inherited from the reptiles that is responsible for such primitive behaviour. Our conscious mind does not have control over most of its reactions as they need to be instantaneous for the sake of our survival. Take the flight-or-fight instinct. If we had to employ all the trappings of our civilised logical conscious mind to decide whether we should escape danger or not we would not stand much chance in times of danger.

As human society develops many behavioural patterns built in the R-complex become undesirable, even counter-productive. But they do not go away without an effort. For example, rage, originally a defense mechanism, is now treated in anger control therapy. It used to help our primate ancestors assert their status in the group but nowadays we have different ways to do that.

Xenophobia is another example. It used to be necessary to identify and assault an outsider for the sake of group's or individual survival. Anyone who does not look like us is by default an enemy and has to be attacked, according to the R-complex. However, in our more developed society this is by far and large not the case any more. Real danger comes now in different shapes but our atavistic brain keeps reacting the best way it knows how. Here lies the biological premise of racism. The reptile inside of us instinctively rears its ugly head, even though as developed humans we should know better.

Only relatively recently has it become widely accepted that xenophobia, which also includes racism, is undesirable and shameful. Only a rather small percentage or population has managed to overcome this reptilian urge to attack anyone who does not look or behave like us. Old habits die hard. Most success comes where more effort is involved. Without it, we will keep behaving like dinosaurs.

The neocortex, the most sublime part of our brain, should be able to see a fellow human being beyond superficial appearances. But it only develops through the effort of education. Philanthropy, "the love of human", that transcends races, religions and customs, needs to be developed and nurtured until we are truly more humans than reptiles in what we think and do.

Digital cloud plan for city skies

"Digital cloud plan for city skies" read a heading in my BBC Live News Update. Wow, my heart started beating faster, finally London gets an overall free WiFi coverage, the so-called "Cloud". That would be so cool, in the country where broadband cable is still a luxury and download speeds are usually limited by the capacity of Victorian copper wires.

Alas, the article turned out to be about building "120m-tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data" Doh. Like the utterly useless "white elephant" of Millenium Dome was not enough. Perhaps this will be the last belch of the lame-duck Labour Government, still delirious after the boom years of the financial bubble. And who will be stuck with the bill? The taxpayer.

Ban bicycles in London! (Skyride 2009)

After 6 years in Amsterdam, I am positively convinced that bicycles are the superior commuter means of transportation but, let's face it, London is simply not made for bikes. Here they are a serious hazard for unsuspecting pedestrians and a major deterrent for city buses. Mountain bike yobs whizzing down crowded sidewalks or a single leisurely cyclist in the bus lane keeping down a string of full buses -- those are familiar daily sights for every Londoner.

The recent London Skyride - on top of creating a horrid traffic snarl-up in Central London - cost the taxpayer 62 pounds a biker! These days that money can fly you to Spain and back.

The Anglo-Saxon fear of central planning has left London with a random sprinkling of cycle lanes and hardly any bicycle racks. With the worst air quality in Western Europe this city is dangerous for cycling commuters just as well. I really feel sorry for those foreign tourists who get duped into hiring a bike for a pleasure ride in London. Watching them trying to navigate through the relentlessly heavy traffic squeezed into a medieval labyrinth of Victorians streets, theirs must be a nightmarish experience.

You won't find me concurring with the Daily Mail columnists very often, but this time I have to take their side: ban bicycles in London!

The secret of the British stiff upper lip

Now I know the secret of the proverbial British stiff upper lip! Nothing to do with strong will, tenacity or aristocratic composure. It's thanks to awful British dentists!

The other day I saw an ad in a glossy magazine advertising luxury shoe shops to wealthy tourists. The slogan went: "The British have awful teeth, that's why they need beautiful shoes!" What a horrible distinction!

Swine flu vaccine: a profit-generating myth

Following the bird flu and atypical pneumonia, these days the swine flu is the focus of a massive media hoopla. After 300 people died worldwide, it has been proclaimed a pandemic. Give me a break, more people die every year choking on fish bones but I don't see a war on fish waged anywhere.

The real reason for this well-orchestrated hysteria may be in what is peddled as the salvation: the so-called vaccine. Anyone whose ever peeped into a school textbook of anatomy and hygiene would know that there in principle can be NO anti-viral vaccine.

As usual, the USA is the trend-setter for this kind of nonsense: they kicked it off back in the days of the Bush administration when a 7-billion bird flu vaccine contract was awarded to a company owned by Rumsfelld, Dubya's best crony. Now this get-rich-quick scheme has become adopted all around the world, scaring millions in spending on something that accomplishes nothing.